


La Vitrioleuse

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: F/M, Female Crowley (Good Omens), Holy Water, M/M, Other, Paris - Freeform, Post-Break Up, acid-throwing, f!Crowley, sulphuric acid, the belle epoque
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22945525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: Paris in 1889 was a vicious bitch.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29





	La Vitrioleuse

Paris in 1889 was a vicious bitch. 

To know Paris in the throes of the _Belle Epoque_ was to know the refuge of a demon spurned. A creature bound to scarlet wonder, pressing its tongue to clefts of salted earth, seeking the grotesque to forget a severed arrangement. He grew into her, and she--refusing to crawl into exile--walked tall among those who’d also been used so poorly, and for so long, and would see the world burn for it. 

_Parisss_. A place more _bete_ than _belle_ , where the arts embraced ecstasy and vulgarity, and dram by poisonous dram, all pain was made exquisite.

Even there, between the windmill and the white heart upon the hill, Crowley was a lady of red repute. 

Night and day she prowled among women and souls undecided, each in her state of rebellion, all found climbing atop pennyfarthing bicycles or pennywhistle men. Crowley’s dress was the black of injustice. At the sight of her red hair, its waves long and longing, hearts jumped in distress, as when embers were scattered upon a boudoir floor. A pale cloud followed in her wake, the perfume of the righteously Lost. Through fashionable streets and mean ones, she rolled her hips like her cohort, bone-driven by a fever of love’s torment, by hate and hurt, dripping with cigarettes and morphine. 

Where Crowley walked, men threw wide their dance hall doors just for the chance to smell her smoke. Backstage, dancers beckoned Crowley into their cramped dressing rooms. They didn’t recognize her, but the woman in black was an old companion. Wherever passion had been carved back to its root, to suffering, there too was Crowley. 

She folded herself into a torn silk chair and drank them in. Upon trembling legs, stockings drooped, loose of their ribbons in the after-hour chatter. At every chippy vanity, a stool and a weary woman. At their center sat Crowley like a restless, yellow-eyed cat. 

This one with red-limned eyes, the only rings she’d ever get for love. 

This one as dark and silent as the basilica at night.

This one with her bare, pink heart hanging out of her words. 

This one with the bow-shaped mouth, and the man-shaped bruise on her lovely little life.

With honeyed voices, they asked for her story: Why had she left London? From what well did she draw such anger? Where had she gotten her black lenses? 

“Ghastly old place. Lords of this and ladies of that. Everywhere a name with power behind it, and none to spare for anyone else. I only wanted a little leverage, but no. Oh, no, can’t be trusted. Not with a drop. Not a single squirt, for all I did for him. . .” Crowley smoked as she talked, tapping ash onto the bare, black floor. “Ducks know when to pack off for bad weather, don’t they?” 

Somewhere between the little piece of paper going up in flames, and the first lonely day afterward, the old Crowley has lost the will to fight. He’d spent his valuable words on an angel’s favor, got himself good and rebuffed, and then couldn’t raise a single curse to save face. He hadn’t the throat for it, the old mattress. The voice that’d chatted mankind to doom, author of the Burning Question, legendary pest of Hell and Earthly raconteur, cowed by the patron-angel of shame and repression. By a _friend_. 

Before it had all gone wobbly, they’d enjoyed Paris together. Returning alone would’ve been pathetic had Crowley not made such an emphatic change of corporation. She had grown pointed--well, more than usual--in the wake of the angel’s refusal. Nails sharp, eyes sharper. 

Across the dressing room, she peered at a crystal city of perfume bottles gathered at the mirror. Beside them, apart, the utilitarian shape of a stout, brown bottle. 

“What’s that?” asked Crowley, squinting through smoke.

The woman with the bow-shaped mouth tapped a sharp fingernail against the brown bottle. 

“Power,” she said, and deja-vu skittered down Crowley’s spine.

_Acide Sulfurique_ , read the label. 

The woman with the bow-shaped mouth uncorked the bottle, and poured a small measure of liquid into an empty champagne glass.

To anyone but a demon, it might’ve smelled like nothing. To Crowley, it was a malicious memory of home. The smell of the overused waystation at which one is stranded on their way to somewhere better.

The liquid in the cut-crystal glass shimmied and went still. A drop. A spit. A splash of holy retribution. It was all they had, these women; vitriol, and the temerity to use it.

Crowley wondered if the angel might have used a bottle like that. Label and all.

_H*ly Water_

But he hadn’t, had he? No surprise that the coward of the Eastern Gate, content in the relinquishment of his own weapon, never having suffered _actual_ slings and arrows, failed to imagine the importance of a defensive strategy. Not even for his only friend in the world. The consequence of always appearing cool, capable, and powerful was that people believed you _were_ those things. Was it Crowley’s fault if the angel fell for a lie or two or ten? She sighed from the bottoms of her artfully shod corporeal feet. 

“Centuries to make, a moment to break,” she murmured. 

Reaching out with a cupped hand, she picked up the glass.

“To love and be loved, it’s everything,” said the woman with the bow-mouth, sounding extremely French. She gazed in faint alarm at Crowley’s long-fingered hand, and the glass within it. “And when it’s gone? Turned black at the center? Why, everything becomes nothing. Poisonous nothing. What recompense can there be for that?”

Now _that_ was French. With a hint of Russian.

“Love that’s lost to betrayal is the worst,” said the woman with the red-rimmed eyes. “Only the devil cares for you when your soul is left so bare.”

“He does like a bit of naked heartbreak,” agreed Crowley, who’d never mustered the interest for love-betrayals. She swiveled and curled forward. Acid swished testily in the bowl of the champagne glass. “So, listen, this is all really swell. The solidarity thing. You’ve been hurt, I’ve been hurting. Been dodging that, lately, actually. You know how it is, a job loses all its sparkle. . .Look, I’m just not seeing the angle on a single bowl of . . . acid.”

She’d argued convincingly--against her own mind, yes, but she was always Crowley’s best sparring partner--and brightened to remember how talented she was at this part of it. The power the angel had denied her? It wouldn’t have worked out the way Crowley planned. It never did.

“Well, that’s that,” said Crowley, setting the little glass of vitriol on the low table before her. 

The dancer with the bow-mouth gave Crowley a long, hopeless look. 

“A man has never taken you for granted?” said Red Eyes, from her stool.

“A love, a great love has never flowered in the warmth of your gaze, while you must beg for an hour of sun?” said Pink Heart.

Crowley stared mildly, inhaling the ribbon of her cigarette smoke so it curled into her nostrils. She said nothing.

“You’ve never starved, nightly, at a feast of promises, and spent the morning sick?” said the woman with the bow-mouth.

But her eyes found no purchase on Crowley’s features. 

Bow Mouth leaned forward, the neck of her chemise sighed down her shoulders. As she gazed into the glass of vitriol, she seemed to cast her remaining questions, and herself, into the precarious reflection there.

Then, the Silent One broke character. Having stowed her needle and vial, she too came forward to question the red-haired question mark.

“She was pushed away. Isn’t it so? Did your bones break beside your heart?” Eyes like a lunar eclipse she had. Black hair dripped and reached for Crowley as her head fell to the side, where her cruel smile was heaviest. “Isn’t it true, for love, you would break what remains of you for the chance to try again?” 

Would they call it love, had they something worse to compare it to?

There was power in never saying the word, burning it out of the firmament so that it couldn’t be grabbed and weaponized. She could offer them that, teach them how two people could play forever on a piano with a missing key.

Slowly, Crowley shook her head.

“Yeah, I was pushed. Half-hearted shove, really, by a terrible softy who loves every-bloody-thing, even pears. Who has an opinion about pears?” Crowley sniffed, twitching her nose. “No. The last thing he’d want to do is hurt me.”

“But, darling,” said Bow-Mouth, “that _is_ the last thing he did.”

“I bet he stomped away, like you’d done _him_ wrong.”

“Bet he went for tea and cakes afterward.” 

“Bet he went to a show.”

They’d have made good demons, these dancers who threw vengeance and suffering from champagne glasses. They’d have been a better class, anyway, better company. Crowley grinned, leaking smoke from between her teeth.

“I’m sure he did. He’ll do it all again and again,” she said, knowingly, “but he’ll do it all alone.”

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by writing exercises with my writer's group, and by the poster-art of Eugene Grasset, whose work I lovingly manipulated for this piece.


End file.
